You know actually, as I read the Evening Standard piece in its full published version, I’m a little less comfortable with it than I thought I was. It really does concentrate completely on the idea of weblogs as diaries, which I’m afraid they’re just not – people use them to talk to each other, to express their opinions and to invite response. So basically it’s a complete ‘here we go again’ of an article – the same article that the British press write every single time they think about weblogs. In fact it’s so familiar that I believe I’ve even written this kind of semi-stroppy response before. Several times. Here’s the most recent one: On how journalists write about webloggers. There’s no questioning about why millions of people would suddenly start writing diaries in public, no sense that other media can be organised chronologically. I can’t blame them for writing it in this way, but it is really kind of boring.
What I think I can get a little narky about is the description of this site as a place where I detail everything about my life, “accompanied by photographs”. Over the last few years, I’ve posted very little about my life at all. It’s just wrong. And it’s worse that it’s under a heading like, “Dear London, today I wore blue socks to work…” That seems to me to be just sloppy work with a little bit of fiddling your facts to fit your story.
Almost exactly five years ago The Evening Standard did its first article on weblogs and I contributed to that too. It was called ‘Blog On for an Ego Trip’ (the fault of the sub-editor rather than the journalist concerned) and I wrote about it here. It was actually a pretty decent article, much like most of this one. It got some stuff wrong, and the title was a nightmare, but these were early days when there were only a few thousand webloggers in the world. Now there are millions. The weblog world has moved on enormously and has had an impact in altogether unexpected places. I think it would be reasonable to expect that the press would keep up with these changes. Maybe I’m being mean. Dunno.
Anyway, for those of you who have found themselves on here for the first time and are wondering what to make of it all – it’s still great to have you here. I’m afraid I don’t write much about my personal life, so if that’s what you’re looking for I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I tend to write more about the stuff I work around – social software, personal publishing, design and the future of TV and radio. If that stuff appeals to you, then we’ll probably get on quite well. And almost every day I get together a list of the stuff that I’ve found interesting on the web. Some people find that kind of useful.
